Your Tableau Dashboard is Watching You — You Are Being Tracked

Data analysts work on improving your dashboard, and developing new features day and night, over the weekend, with eating or drinking being a low priority. Tableau end users then enjoy the fruit of our hard work, the new insights that we have nurtured and created for your enjoyment.

But do the Tableau users really use what we have created for them? If yes, how they use it exactly? Was it worth the day and night work? We have no idea. Or to be more precise we HAD no idea.

Starschema’s Fortune 500 clients were very curious about what their consumers do and how they use the dashboard.

With our new extension you can track who is just opening the dashboard and looking at it, but don’t really click anywhere on it; who and how are actually using the common filter combinations; what do people do with the dashboards, who is checking salary information, etc. You can now collect, analyze and visualize this information.

However, Tableau Tracker is not just a tool to satisfy ones’ curiosity. Sometimes it is there to be able to provide crucial and very useful information, like who checked certain Social Security Numbers for HIPA compliance reasons, or if someone was required or not to check a client’s account number based on the banking regulations. Tableau Tracker extension gives an answer to these compliance requirements, which can be essential in running your business.

How to set it up and how to use it?

Go to the now familiar Tableau Extensions menu and choose Tableau Tracker. Once you allow it, the extension will pop up on your dashboard. In order for the Tableau Tracker to collect the information, you need to set up a ‘Deployment ID’.

How to register and why do we need it?

We can safely store future events on the cloud, just like in Google Analytics. The Deployment ID is there to identify which tracked event belongs to which user. The Admin Key is there to be able to download the usage information. The Dashboard only contains the Deployment ID, thus, if someone is only using the dashboard or only makes basic editing on it, he or she would not have access to the collected data.

As soon as you have it, you can start tracking.

You can also configure it and make it a floating chart.

If you would not like to see the recording as part of your dashboard, you can resize it, make it just a small green button showing the recording. This way it does not interfere with your visualization.

In order to try it, I changed the region, and changed the city on my sample dashboard.

Opening a new Tableau Desktop and taking the information through WebDataConnector, you can go, and check who did what in my dashboard with your newly acquired Deployment ID and Admin Key.

With just adding one Tableau Extension, I am able to see users consume in my Tableau Dashboard.

As you can see, you can then go to your data source and clearly see what has been changed in your dashboard.

Everything we have done on our dashboard nicely shows up, and it gives a granular information of what has been done on my dashboard, who clicked on what, what is in use, what is not, information on geo location, where people click and what device they are using, how many interactions happened.

You can also create nice aggregated dashboards showing time spent on dashboard, bounce rate and other meaningful metrics.

Should you like your information not to be stored in the cloud, but securely running on the internal network of your business, please call us, and we can help.